to enter space, died of pancreatic cancer July 23, 2012, at the age of only 61. Though much of the news coverage after her passing focused on her groundbreaking flight aboard Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983 or on her previously unknown female partner of 27 years—both important and interesting angles—she was also remembered for championing math and science education for girls.
Romney photo: Gage SkiDmore; Obama/Nichols Photo: TWITTER.COM/NICHELLE NICHOLS (@REALNICHOLS); BIDEN PHOTO: Andrew Cutraro; Ryan/Obama photo: courtesy the white house
THIRD ROCK RADIO LAUNCHES Dubbed “America’s Space Station,” Third Rock Radio (thirdrockradio.net) is a 24/7 online ra-
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couple decades ago, science fiction fans and futurists could be heard wishing that people in power shared their interests in the future. If that were the case, their thinking went, the world would be a better place, because lawmakers would be concerned about how their laws affected society, human freedom, and the environment of tomorrow, and not just next month’s election. In the 2012 election, we had our two major-party presidential candidates as outed science fiction fans. We’ll let you decide if that has resulted in more far-sighted policy. Republican challenger Mitt Romney calls his love for science fiction a “guilty pleasure” and admits to liking works ranging from Battlefield Earth to The Hunger Games to Star Wars, according to Politico.com, a website for all things political-wonkish. In 2007, he also told Hugh Hewitt, a conservative talk show host, that his favorite novel was The Lord of the
dio station reporting the latest in space news. Produced by Houston’s RFCMedia, Third Rock also has a blog and can be found on Facebook, where you’ll be kept up to speed on the latest NASA news and photos. PUMZI – Kenya’s first SF Film The future isn’t bright in Pumzi, a short science fiction film from Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahlu. Released in 2010, the film showed a downbeat future in a world rocked by wars over water, and it centers on a woman who is fighting to return some plant life
to Earth’s surface. Kahlu told Wired.com that she struggled with Kenya’s still-germinating film development system, but she managed to pull together the funding and shoot the film nonetheless. Find out more at pumzithefilm.com. Amazing stories mag lives One of the first and often-canceled science fiction magazines, Amazing Stories, has been resurrected online. Find it all at amazingstoriesmag.com.
Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, and that other favorite authors were Anne McCaffrey and Orson Scott Card. But the current occupant of the White House is not to be outdone. A known comics collector, President Barack Obama is not only a Star Trek fan, as is Romney, but he managed to bring Uhura actor Nichelle Nichols to the Oval Office for a photo op (see right). His love for the show is so strong, reported The New York Times, that “Mr. Romney, after all, calls himself a big Star Trek fan but stops short of identifying as a Trekkie. Not so Mr. Obama, the First Trekkie indeed, who once admitted to a youthful crush on Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played Lieutenant Uhura. “ So whoever won the election, we were going to have a Trekkie SF fan in the White House. The situation at the vice president’s office was less clear. Romney running mate Paul Ryan was famously a fan of Ayn Rand’s SF story Atlas Shrugged, but the Roman Catholic congressman has since downplayed his infatuation with the objectivist atheist author. Meanwhile, incumbent Joe Biden was blown away by James Cameron’s Avatar film, though he forgot the title while he was praising it in an MSNBC TV interview. That’s okay. If he ever assumes the presidency, we’ll send him the complete Battlestar Galactica bluray set.
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